Welcome to The Tuning Fork

Notes from the Resounding Deep

Into the Deep (תְּהוֹם - Tehom)

‘It is not...that Christianity can stand here at its ancient gate, innocent of the aggressions of the West, ready to receive refugees from secular modernity.

It may be the case, however, that we who repent the spectacular failure of Christendom to do justice, practice kindness or walk humbly with our God, are ready for new and stranger coalitions’.

Catherine Keller
Face of the Deep: a theology of becoming

The Tuning Fork will listen for sounds...feel for frequencies... from the resounding Deep (תְּהוֹם - Tehom).

For the ‘Silent Cry’.

A mystical name for G_d, ‘whose divine power is not grounded in domination and commandment’.

‘O deep treasure, how wilt thou be unearthed?’

The Silent Cry is unearthed by bodies, not brains. It is embodied treasure.

So The Tuning Fork will practice theo-poeisis, more than theo-logos. Drawing from lived experience. Felt knowledge. Embodied practice. Hebraic thought, which happens in the heart (לֵב - Lev).¹

My name is Vanessa and I am an artist, spiritual director, and practical theologian.

I create hospitable spaces for people outside (and inside) of religion to be encountered by aliveness in the Jewish-Christian tradition.

I hope The Tuning Fork might become such a space.

If our Modern world is going through a dark night of the soul,
we will need to be drawing from deeper imaginal waters than those offered by that world.

Perhaps my essays might become receptacles that people can use to draw from the deeper imaginal waters...the deep wells...of the Jesus traditions in order to return home and water their own lands.

I won’t be trying to convince anyone of anything. I just create spaces for encounter.²

I write from my body. And I write as a woman.

The Christian tradition forgot about women and it forgot about the body. Of the human and of the earth.

It then condemned those that hadn’t.

It forgot its Jewish roots. There is nothing abstract about the Hebrew Bible. It is embodied. Of the earth.

I write from within the Jewish-Christian tradition in resistance to that forgetfulness (which has caused immeasurable harm).

Perhaps re-membering the tradition can bear good fruit for these days.

Emerging at last from an underground-dark-night kind of time, I find, to my amazement, that I am carrying baskets laden with fruit, which I am glad to begin to share.

I hold knowledge in my body.

I have carried in my body, for the last twenty years, anticipation for a time when wider culture in the ‘West’ would encounter more directly (i.e. unmediated by church or academy) the fierce beauty of the Jesus traditions and the radical imagination of the Bible.

(Which doesn’t mean I don’t respect the role of church or academy...it just means something more feral is happening alongside).

From where I stand, it seems such a time is arriving.

I was encountered by Jesus on a silent retreat at the top of a mountain in India in 2001.

On returning home to the UK, words spilled out of my mouth about a Jesus that was free to move in ways that weren’t ‘Christian’, and theologies that would more directly serve life on the ground.

At the time I didn’t really know what I was talking about. But, through years of practice, failure, and deep conversation, I may have a better idea now.

For the last while I have positioned my body in that seemingly not-yet time-space and behaved as if such a place existed.

When I’ve met people feeling their way in to such a wilderness place, I’ve been able to wave and say ‘it’s here...it exists’.

My friends in that wilderness have been dead poets, mystics and prophets.

Martin Buber. Dorothy Soelle. The Jewish Prophets. Simone Weil. Rubem Alves. Abraham J. Heschel. Rilke. Audre Lorde. Julian of Norwich. J.R.R. Tolkien. Jacques Derrida. William Stringfellow.

And some living ones too.

Catherine Keller. Walter Brueggemann. Bayo Akomolafe. Wilda Gafney. Willie Jennings. Alastair McIntosh and others.

And my beloved friend-brother-co-conspirator

David Benjamin Blower

whose being is drenched in a biblical imagination. He, like me (and others I hope), has been anticipating such a time of openings.³

This edge-place with no name is not, and never will be, Christian.

It is a liminal space. A threshold place. Of mutual vulnerability. Of encounter.

A crucible of re-imagining. Re-enchantment.

A place, perhaps, of an-atheism.

Of a culture re-encountering G_d after the death of God. And not knowing what to call them.⁴

Resisting domestication. Listening for the Silent Cry.

A place of apophasis. Not knowing.

It is a place of ‘religio-secular alliance’⁵...the ‘new and stranger coalitions’ that Keller mentions above.

Of people drawing from the prophetic edge of the Jewish-Christian tradition as a means to ‘infect’ the atmosphere with a spirit of hope (not optimism), love and ‘responsibility for the world’.⁶

An edge deep enough to ‘offer symbols that are adequate to the horror and massiveness of experience which [otherwise] evokes numbness and requires denial’.⁷

A positive kind of climate change.

It does not replace Church. Though church (ekklesia...a ‘summons to assemble’) may often happen along the way.⁸

There is feasting in that wilderness.

Invitation to deep conversation... dialogue... between a drenched ancient tradition and a parched contemporary culture. Between lovers of the Earth and lovers of the Word.

We take our shoes off (particularly ‘religious’ ones) and become teachable. It is holy ground.

I offer my writing to those ‘tables’...or circles. In service of those conversations.

I will not be defending the Jewish-Christian tradition.⁹ But I will be sharing from my experience within it.

And I will be writing for people that don’t consider themselves religious, but want to encounter the prophetic imagination of that tradition.

Its fierce beauty.

Its resistance to being co-opted by contemporary ideologies...both left and right.

I write for people that long, like me, for prophet songs
across divides.

You can find out more about me here, can listen to my reflections on Land, Eros & Genesis 1 here, and can read how people experience me as a person here (tho admittedly only the good stuff).

I will post an essay (around 3000 words) every 3-4 weeks, with not much going on, initially at least, in between.

They will be freely available, but if you would like to support me financially nonetheless that would be VERY helpful. Putting my experience into words takes me a long time, and I am entirely self-employed. So if my writing can find a way to sustain itself, the rest of my life will make a lot more sense.

Painting my own - ‘Into the Deep’
Tuning Fork (lino print) last minute logo thanks to

Lydia Catterall

(Over time it should become clear why I speak of ‘G_d’, rather than God, or G-d, and why I speak of the ‘Jewish-Christian’, rather than ‘Judeo-Christian’, tradition)

And p.s.¹⁰

1. Both quotes in this section are taken from Dorothy Soelle’s beautiful book, which I will be drawing from a lot - The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance.

‘Rational Man’ doesn’t exist in the Hebrew Bible. The head is in the heart (Lev).

I am deeply indebted to Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep in my understanding of and reflections on the ‘Tehom’ of Genesis 1.

2. The idea of encounter is very important to me, and I draw deeply on the work of Jewish sociologist-theologian Martin Buber in that regard. And on my own life experience.

3. For a while, when I fell out of the bottom of my church-life as I had known it, David,

Liz Slade

and

Dougald Hine

were the only people I felt ‘allowed’ to say ‘yes’ to in life. They were my contemporary friends in the (probably no longer a) wilderness.

4. See Richard Kearney’s book, Anatheism: returning to God afer God

5. Catherine Keller, Political Theology of the Earth - it’s worth sharing the full quote from this wonderful ‘am I really allowed to read this?’ book:

‘As its [theology’s] failing body hunches ever closer to the earth, its own ancient practice - in the name of mysticism, spirituality, religious plurality, or religio-secular alliance - may be enlisted for surprising new publics’. (p.134)

6. Jurgen Moltmann, Church in the Power of the Holy Spirit

7. Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination

8.

David Benjamin Blower

writes beautifully about the Ekklesia as a concept which is alive to these times - see his upcoming book on Messianism.

9. Actually that’s not true. I definitely will be defending the Jewish element of it.

If you want to read a beautiful and brutally honest defense of Christian practice, I recommend my friend

Elizabeth Oldfield

’s new book, Fully Alive (her chapter on sex is particularly good).

10. I love footnotes. I think you get to know a writer best through their footnotes. Written for those curious enough to make the effort to read. So there will often be footnotes.